Tag Archives for Natural history

Friday mystery object #516 answer

Last week I gave you a close-up of an object that caught my attention when visiting a friend who works at the Natural History Museum, Denmark:

The original image I had gave a bit too much information to make this a challenge, so I have to admit to doing some judicious cropping, and I wasn’t sure if this was going to be an easy or difficult one,

It turns out I made just difficult enough for most people to get in wrong, but there was one correct answer, from Katenockles on Mastodon:

Here’s my original photo:

As you can see, this is part of the antler of a Reindeer Rangifer tarandus (Linnaeus, 1758) that still bears the velvet, which is the hairy outer layer of skin covering various layers of tissue. These include the perichondrium and periosteum, which surround and protect the cartilage and bone being grown by highly vascularised mesenchyme tissue and specialised cells such as chondrocytes and osteoblasts. These cells create a scaffold of cartilage that becomes mineralised to form the bone that makes up the antler.

This mechanism for antler growth is really impressive, since it allows these strong and sometimes very large bony structures to develop in around 6 months – sometimes growing over 7cm a week when good nutrition is available.

This specimen was of particular interest for me, as I’ve never had the opportunity to see an example of the velvet up close. Normally my interactions with antlers involve historic museum specimens taken as trophies during the hunting season, or fossil examples – like this impressive specimen from the Pleistocene of Ireland:

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions – I can certainly see why kangaroos and camels were suggested, and I’m a bit surprised that nobody suggested Platypus, as that was my immediate thought. Finally, very well done to Katenockles for working it out!

Friday mystery object #512 answer

Last week I gave you this guest mystery object to try identifying, from the collection of Andy Taylor FLS FBNA:

Andy had brought this particular specimen along to the NatSCA Conference, which was held in the Manchester Museum this year. It’s not the only one he brought – there were several fantastic specimens from his incredible collection, my favourite being the Bathynomus Giant Marine Isopod:

Me holding a Giant Marine Isopod from Andy Taylor’s collection

It was great to see these specimens, and it’s surprisingly rare to be able to see specimens like this at a conference these days, since UK museums have very strict controls on how accessioned collections are transported and used, which can make it hard to support use in outreach. While this is good for the care of the collections, it does reduce their ability to be used to educate and inspire.

Andy doesn’t have this limitation, since the specimens are from his own collection, which has been built up over 40 years of interest in natural history and through a network of contacts researching life in the deep seas and a variety of other environments. Andy does this because he’s passionate about nature, and his collection is available for use for research, loans to support exhibitions, and use in training and outreach activities.

Many natural history collections in museums came from the activities of passionate naturalists like Andy – in fact quite a lot of local and regional museums in the UK were originally founded to house the collections of local naturalist organisations, that sprung up to support the learning of working people who didn’t have the opportunity to follow an academic route into the natural sciences, but who made huge contributions to our understanding of local biodiversity in the areas in which they were active. These people were true amateurs – doing this work for the love of it, rather than for profit.

Various organisations still support the activities of passionate naturalists (both amateur and professional), such as the British Naturalists’ Association and the Linnean Society of London (of which I am a Fellow) and I think they have huge value for furthering our understanding of natural science and supporting the activities of taxonomists and conservationists who do the vital work needed to protect our threatened natural world.

However, none of this offers an answer to last week’s mystery object, so let’s get to that.

The photos I provided weren’t great, but that didn’t stop the Zygoma regulars from figuring it out. Chris Jarvis indicated that it was a type of mussel, Sallie Reynolds got the clue I offered in last week’s post (“you may need to dive deep to work it out”) and figured it was from very deep in the ocean, and Adam Yates suggested the wrong species in the right genus, and then dialled in on the correct species after a helpful comment from Andy.

This is a specimen of Bathymodiolus thermophilus Kenk & Wilson, 1985 a type of mussel that lives around hydrothermal vents. This particular specimen was collected at a depth of 2.2km from a hydrothermal vent on the East Pacific Rise by Alvin Deep-Submergence Vehicle (DSV) as part of research by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Alvin DSV in action. Photo credit: NOAA, August 1978

The distribution of specimens like this to a variety of people and organisations is an important activity, since it helps ensure examples of species can be made more available for interested parties around the globe – decentralising collections so local events (from earthquakes to funding cuts by anti-science governments) stand less chance of taking specimens out of circulation for research into our global biodiversity.

I would like to offer up my thanks to Andy – his support for this blog has always been enthusiastic and I appreciate it greatly!

Friday mystery object #482

Happy Friday everyone!

This week I have a mystery object for you that came in as an enquiry from a regular donor to the Dead Zoo’s collections. It was found by a fisherman in the Irish Sea, just off Howth, which is a lovely seaside village on a peninsula that marks the northern tip of Dublin Bay :

Any thoughts on what it might be? I suspect some of you will have a pretty good idea, so keep your suggestions cryptic if you can, so everyone has a chance to figure it out for themselves. I hope you have fun figuring it out!

Friday mystery object #454

This week I’m back onto skulls for the mystery object – it’s been a while! Any idea what this handsome fellow from the Dead Zoo might be?

I’m sure that this won’t pose too much of a challenge for the more seasoned bone geeks among you, so why not try to keep the answers cryptic, so everyone can have a go at working it out. Have fun!

Friday mystery object #450

This festive-feeling Friday, I have a mystery object for you that I spotted in Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid earlier this year:

This specimen is part of an exhibition showing some of the historical cabinet type displays from the early formation of the Museum. I couldn’t find a species identification, but I think I know what it is. The question for today is, do you?

Let me know what you think in the comments below – I’d be fascinated to hear your thoughts.

Have an enjoyable festive season!

Friday mystery object #436 answer

Last week I was in the lovely city of Edinburgh, catching up with many of my wonderful natural history colleagues from around the world at the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) conference. While I was there, I spotted this object and thought it might pose an interesting mystery object:

Interesting perhaps, but clearly not very challenging, since I think everyone managed to figure out what it is, despite the unusual viewing angle. Well done to Wouter van Gestel for being the first to comment.

Here’s an image of the same object from a couple of different (and somewhat more common) angles:

The large size and that very distinctive lower jaw, where the two halves of the mandible meet and run parallel for over half the length of the jaw, are unmistakeable (as noticed by Adam Yates). This is the skull of a Sperm Whale Physeter macrocephalus Linnaeus, 1758.

Nearby, I noticed a much smaller version of this specimen, housed in a much smaller version of the National Museums Scotland, which definitely deserves a mention:

The teeth of a Lego whale are probably not as efficient at keeping hold of a squid as the robust curved teeth of the real animal, and the skull is a bit less impressively huge, but it certainly has charm.

If you get a chance to visit Edinburgh I definitely recommend a trip to National Museums Scotland – not just for the Sperm Whale and the Lego, but also for one of the most impressive taxidermy dioramas I’ve ever seen. Here’s a small section to give you an idea:

Friday mystery object #436

This week I have been in the beautiful city of Edinburgh at the conference of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC), Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and the Natural Sciences Collections Association (NatSCA) hosted wonderfully by National Museums Scotland (NMS).

It’s been a fantastic opportunity to catch up with natural history colleagues from around the world and to learn what everyone has been busy doing over the last few years. I also got to see some fantastic specimens held by NMS and I thought I’d set one of them as this week’s mystery object:

Do you have any idea what this might be?

As ever, you can leave your thoughts in the comments box below. Have fun!

Friday mystery object #420 answer

Last week I gave you this deep sea mystery to have a go at identifying:

It was picked up on the Porcupine Bank, which is a raised area of the Irish shelf around 200km off the west coast of Ireland, just before the drop off into the abyssal depths of the Atlantic.

Although it’s a little hard to tell from the photo, the object is around 1m long. It has a conical cavity at the base, but it’s fairly shallow, extending only about 20cm before fully closing up.

The fact this isn’t a tube allows us to rule out the possibility that this is from some unholy giant scaphopod:

Or indeed a particularly well-formed giant ship-worm, like one I’ve featured before:

You can’t tell from the photo, but it’s very dense and heavy. What you can see is that it has some quite well defined longitudinal ridges:

This isn’t something you normally find in horns, but you do find in tusks. So the question has to be, what kind of tusk is this?

I’ve talked about tusks before on this blog, and I’ve spent a lot of time identifying ivories over the years, after learning key diagnostic features from the wonderfully knowledgable Dr Sonia O’Connor, both in her training courses and working alongside her when I was at the Horniman Museum and she was visiting to do some research. This tusk reminds me of one of the more tricky ones we looked at.

The marine location suggests it could be from a Walrus. The overall shape isn’t bad, but Walrus tusks tend to be no more that about 75cm long at their longest. They also have a more squared-off section at the base and often a deeper groove on the sides partway along the length from the base, so it seems unlikely.

Really that just leaves something proboscidian – but here we hit the difficult bit. Mammoth tusks have been dredged from the sea many times, from fossils in sediments that became covered by sea level rises after the melting of glaciers around 11,500 years ago. However, Elephant tusks were transported in huge nubers to Europe by ship to supply the demands of the ivory trade between the late 18th and early 20th Century, so it is entirely possible that this is a relic of that trade (as suggested by Chris Jarvis).

In my experience, submerged Mammoth tusks are seldom in such good condition as this. While there is some degration and flaking towards the tip, there is much less of the deep staining or separation of dentine fibrils that I would normally expect from Mammoth tusk submerged for several thousand years.

However, if it was more deeply buried until recently it may have avoided the worst of that degradation, so that expectation isn’t good enough.

There is a method for distinguishing between Mammoth and Elephant ivory, that relies on an artefact of the tooth development process. This involves measuring the intersection angle of Schreger lines (an optical feature resulting from light interacting with dentine tubules) in a polished section of the tusk:

In Elephants the angle of intersection tends to be obtuse (>90o), whereas in Mammoths they are more acute (<90o). Of course, to see this would require cutting a section of tusk, so it may have to remain a mystery until the desalination treatment has been completed and I can see if there is an opportunity to check any broken surfaces or prepare a small sample.

The question in this case has to be, how important is it to know the identity, compared to the importance of keeping the specimen as intact as possible? That is a bigger conversation that will need to be had with my colleagues.

Thanks for your thoughts everyone!

Friday mystery object #415 answer

Last week I gave you this Blaschka glass model of a marine invertebrate to have a go at identifying:

It was a bit of a mean one, since it’s from a very poorly known group of animals – and I mean that in more than one way. The taxonomic group is poorly known and the model represents a group of animals, not just a single individual.

So while this looks a bit like a jellyfish, it’s actually a siphonophore, which is a type of colonial organism that has discrete cloned zooids which fulfil specialised functions, similar to organs that cooperative to create a metaorganism.

Generally in siphonophores, these zooids are arranged on a stem in an organised pattern, with either two or three main zones of specialised zooids, depending on the taxonomic Suborder.

The zooid zone common to all siphonophores is the siphosome made up of feeding zooids with stinging cells, reproductive zooids and sometimes zooids with defensive functions. The two other zooid zones are the nectosome, which is comprised of zooids that act like tiny jet engines for swimming and the pneumatophore, which is a gas-filled zooid at the top of the stalk that acts as a float:

The presence or absence of particular zones is indicative of the particular Suborder of siphonophore, where the Physonectae have all three zones, the Cystonectae lack the swimming zooid zone and the Calycophorae lack the float.

I’m telling you all of this because it helps in narrowing down the mystery object. As you can see, there is no single zooid at the top acting as a float, so it must be one of the Calycophorae.

Within the Calycophorae most families only have one or two swimming bells and although the nectosome in the mystery object is not quite up to the Blaschka’s usual level of detail, it clearly contains more than two zooids, which is a feature of the Hippopodiidae.

The Hippopodiidae only contains two genera, Vogtia and Hippopodius and the two can be distinguished by the shape of the nectophores – in Vogtia they’re pentagonal whereas in Hippopodius they’re a more simple crescent shape – as we see here.

Back when the Blaschkas were making their models, there were a few species included in the genus Hippopodius, but they only made one that’s mentioned in their catalogues:

“209. Hippopodius gleba, Leuckart (Hippopoda lutea, Qu. & G.)”.

These days all the various species have been synonymised to just one – Hippopodius hippopus (Forsskål, 1776).

So well done to everyone who recognised that this was a siphonophore, even better if you spotted it was one of the Calycophorae and bravo if you got the genus (and therefore species).

Next week I plan to have a change from Blaschkas, much to everyone’s relief I’m sure 😉

Friday mystery object #413

This week I’ve been packing some of the Dead Zoo’s beautiful Blaschka glass models, that were moved during our decant and have been sitting in my office waiting to be dealt with:

Most of the Blaschka models we have are well identified and many even have the number that they were given for ordering in the Catalogue of Glass Models of Invertebrate Animals, Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, by H. A. Ward, Rochester, N.Y., 1878.

However, as is sometimes the case with old collections, there has been a degree of dissociation of information from the specimens and one or two of our models have lost their data. This little squid is one such specimen.

I managed to track down the modern accepted name for this specimen, which is very different to the name used by the Blaschka’s when they made and sold this model. With that original name I was even able to figure out the order number from the Ward catalogue. I enjoyed the detective work and I hope you do too!

Let’s see if you all come to the same conclusion about this specimen as I did. I’ve added a couple of extra images below to help you in your quest. Have fun!

Friday mystery object #297 answer

Last week I gave you this shiny green beetle with white spots (and apparently a penchant for making balloon animals) to identify:

mystery297

I thought it might offer a bit more of a challenge, but I forgot about Google. It turns out that a Google Image search using the key distinguishing features provides some useful images to compare, making this easier than I expected.

As palfreyman1414 correctly recognised (followed by many others), this is the Spotted Flower Beetle Stephanorrhina guttata (Olivier, 1789).

Of course, when dealing with historic museum collections things are never quite that simple, so the specimen on display is actually referred to by the genus name Ceratorrhina which isn’t recognised today. Ceratorhina was synonymised with Cyprolais, which is a subgenus (containing the Horniman Beetle) that’s in the genus Eudicella.

Of course, that means that this specimen may have been named incorrectly in the first place, since I’ve seen nothing to suggest that Ceratorrhina has been directly linked to beetles in the genus Stephanorrhina which sometimes carry the synonym Aphelorhina in older collections information.

It would be interesting to work out how the incorrect name was applied to this display specimen, but I have an inkling that there was once a rogue curator who just liked to cause taxonomic trouble…

Friday mystery object #287 answer

Last week I gave you this specimen from the Grant Museum of Zoology Micrarium to try your hand at identifying:

20160915_121009-1.jpg

I enjoyed the variety of entertaining answers, ranging from a preschool drawing of a grandma with a beehive hairdo to a larval Alien, but I was also impressed by the range of cryptic clues about the identity of the specimen.

A favourite was a reference to “dealing with a pea covering” or variations on that theme, which gives us “Cope” and “pod”, which is what this is – a Copepod (which means “oar-foot” in Greek). For those of you unfamiliar with copepods are small crustaceans, many of which live as zooplankton and that as a group may make up the majority of the Earth’s animal biomass. They’re tiny, but there are countless billions of them.

This one isn’t as tiny as many of its relatives, because it has a rather different lifestyle to planktonic forms. This is a sea louse and it’s a parasite of fish. They feed on the mucus, skin and blood of fish and if they reach high levels of infestation they can be a real problem, potentially killing fish. This particular specimen has two trailing egg cases, which I think threw some of you. It was removed from a Brill and as Daniel Calleri recognised from a visit to the Grant Micrarium, it’s Lepeophtheirus hippoglossi (Krøyer, 1837).

If you’ve been to the Grant Museum and have photos from the Micrarium, or if you have any photos of tiny animals, you might fancy entering a Twitter and Instagram competition by sharing them with the hashtag #MicroMultitudes, Have fun with your photos!

Friday mystery object #286 answer

Last week I gave you this mystery object to identify, found on a beach in Ireland:

mystery286

It led to a lot of great cryptic comments relating to marine birds and sternum keels, but Lena was the first to comment and was spot on with the species (or at least as far as I can tell!)

Bird sterna are quite distinctive, with overall shape giving an indicator of mode of life. Long narrow but well-developed keels like this tend to be seen in marine birds that use their wings to fly underwater. The shape of the bottom and sides of the sternum tend to be quite specific to particular genera and species, making sterna pretty good for identification.

Of course that depends on having good comparative material and I was delighted to find John Rochester’s very helpful Flickr page, that has a comparison of British Auks (in this case we’re talking about the geographical British Isles rather than the sociopolitical concept of Britain).

If you take a look at those images you’ll notice that one fits the shape very well indeed – the Guillemot or Common Murre Uria aalge (Pontoppidan, 1763).

1024px-common_murre_rwd2

Guillemot with its meat and feathers on. Image by Dick Daniels, 2011

So that’s the identification I gave to Emer, Ronan, Rory and Paddy who found it on their hols!

 

Friday mystery object #285 answer

Last week I gave you this unassuming bit of bone, that I found with no identification in the Grant Museum of Zoology stores:

mystery285

Daniel Jones and Daniel Calleri identified the element as a radius, but beyond that there was a general feeling that identification of species was a bit on the tricky side. Palfreyman1414 pointed out that it’s something approximately human sized, with Lena ruling out an ungulate, suggesting that it could be from a carnivore or possibly a marsupial.

I must admit that my mind immediately went to carnivores and I initially thought it could be from a Black Bear, since it’s fairly robust and about the right length. However, after checking the ever helpful Adams & Crabtree book I realised that bears are even more chunky than this.

It didn’t look right for a dog since they are straighter, have a flatter profile and a narrower distal end. However, it did look right for a big cat and I’m fairly certain that it’s from a Leopard Panther pardus (Linnaeus, 1758). If you want to compare a Leopard with a Dog radius you can see them compared in this paper, along with a good description of the bones of the Leopard forearm.

A bit of a tricky challenge – so next time I may try to do something a bit more distinctive!